Gotta wonder how long this stability will last. Hopefully enough to make more economists aware of its usefulness. There's little sense in showing off an economy that fluctuates by a factor of 10x every few weeks.

It doesn't really matter what the rates will be in 2013. Try to think in the long term and I hope the most in here will agree that bitcoin will succeed over time. But for a quick answer: Everything points to a higher USD/BTC rate in 2013 than now as long as the usage of decentralized 'currencies' do not become illegal until next year. To be speculative: I choose something between 20 and 30 USD for 2013. The government has the power to stop/break the best inventions for a short time but it never worked in the long term. So it's also possible that bitcoins will loose a lot of the actual value in 2013 but the chance that the value increases over time is very high.

Bitcoin has a huge potential because of the decentralization, speed for transactions, possible security and privacy in it's design. Anonymity isn't really a part when it comes to the standard user. Non-technical users will never understand what bitcoin really is, but as soon as there are a lot of great software and web services available that makes it easier and saver for everyone to use bitcoins (not just for transactions but also for storing 'money') than anything else before, a lot more companies will start using it and any FIAT currency (not just the USD) will loose a lot of it's value and all the actual bitcoin holders will be billionaires ;). It's still just a construct for trading money instead of a fully accepted 'currency' because no one knows about the government's reaction (especially these days) and so it's very risky to store money within bitcoins in a short term. They will try to fight against such decentralized networks like they try it every time without any success in the long term. Every fight against it will make it stronger. I think it will be a very long fight for the whole bitcoin economy but I also think that bitcoins will win the fight and be the currency of the future sooner or later. So try to think in the long term and the chance that your bitcoins become more and more valuable over time is very high.

Keep in mind that all this is just speculation and the way I see it. I'm not a finance expert.